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The Rise and Fall Of The Rise and Fall of the Organizing Model in the U.S. Richard W. Hurd Professor of Labor Studies Cornell University (607) 255-2765 [email protected] forthcoming in Trade Unions and Democracy: Strategies and Perspectives Edited by G. Wood and M. Harcourt Manchester University Press 2004 2 3 With union representation at an all-time low and public support for unions the highest it’s been in years, there’s never been a better time for changing to organize. - AFL-CIO (1996:8) Organizing has been at the center of union strategy discussions in the U.S. for twenty years, and since 1995 new member recruitment has been the top priority of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and of many individual national unions. Prompted originally by a steep drop in membership during the Ronald Reagan era, attention to organizing increased over time as it became clear that modest adjustments in practice were not halting decline. During the late 1980s an important step was taken with the founding of the Organizing Institute (OI), ostensibly a training school for organizers but symbolizing dreams for union revitalization. In the 1990s impatience with continued stagnation grew among national union leaders, and John Sweeney was elected as President of the AFL-CIO on a platform that emphasized organizing. Sweeney had constructed labor’s most successful recruitment program as the President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the hope was that he would be able to apply his magic touch to the labor movement as a whole. The enthusiasm and sense of movement inspired by Sweeney’s election in 1995 served to magnify interest from abroad in the now clearly established organizing priority, especially among labor leaders and sympathetic academics in Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Germany where union fortunes were also in decline. The OI served as a prototype for Australia’s Organizing Works and Britain’s Organizing Academy. 4 Much of the strategic debate in the U.S. has revolved around the organizing model, which is associated with more activist, grassroots methods of organizing and member mobilization. In spite of widespread endorsement of this model, the reality is that rhetoric has far outpaced action and mobilization is still a relatively isolated phenomenon. Furthermore, with only occasional pauses union density has continued its downward trend, especially in the private sector. This chapter reviews the evolution of recent union strategy in the U.S., with particular attention to organizational change initiated to promote the organizing priority. It also assesses the failure of organizing to halt contraction in spite of isolated successes, and evaluates future prospects. Historical Background Increased attention to organizing began a quarter of a century ago in the context of political defeat and economic dislocation. In 1978 a concerted labor law reform effort designed to facilitate recruitment failed in spite of Democratic Party control of both houses of Congress and support from President Jimmy Carter. The proposal was modest, increasing penalties for employer violations of the law and providing union staff with limited access to the workplace during recruitment campaigns. Nonetheless, passage would have facilitated growth without the need for organizational change; union organizers could have maintained their insurance agent posture and increased their sales activity, assured of adding new member-customers fully within the context of the (as yet unnamed) servicing model. Two years later President Carter’s bid for re-election failed and the anti-union reign of Ronald Reagan began. 5 The labor movement lost more than one-fifth of its private sector members during the first half of the 1980s. Although the President’s appointees to the National Labor Relations Board issued a steady stream of adverse legal decisions, economic change proved far more devastating. Twin recessions in 1981 and 1983 were bad enough alone, but unions also faced the combined forces of globalization, deregulation (which started in the Carter years), and technological change. Manufacturing was hit particularly hard and leading unions like the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) and the United Automobile Workers (UAW) experienced sharp membership losses and dwindling resources. Concessionary bargaining began in manufacturing but quickly spread to other sectors. Unionized companies throughout the private economy began to turn to non-union contractors to perform work formerly assigned to their own employees. It was in the context of this crisis that national union leaders confronted the deficiencies in prevailing union practice. The AFL-CIO Executive Council initiated strategic planning under the auspices of the newly created Evolution of Work Committee in 1983, with the presidents of the UAW, the USWA and most other top unions participating in the process. Initial consideration of dramatic restructuring of the labor movement through mega mergers to consolidate around “cones of influence” with clearly defined jurisdictions proved too threatening to some unions and the idea was abandoned.1 Instead, a blueprint for change was adopted in 1985 that included reorientation of the AFL-CIO as well as suggested courses of action for affiliated unions. The strategic plan was summarized in The Changing Situation of Workers and Their Unions (AFL-CIO, 1985). Five sets of modest recommendations were included: 1 Interestingly, this concept has resurfaced recently in the form of a framework proposed by the SEIU, as discussed in the final section of this chapter. 6 • New methods of advancing interests of workers (including associate membership programs and union sponsored credit cards). • Increasing members’ participation in their union. • Improving the labor movement’s communications. • Improving organizing activity. • Structural changes to enhance the labor movement’s overall effectiveness (including merger guidelines, a shadow of the cones of influence proposal). The AFL-CIO’s first major effort to promote organizing under the new plan was a coordinated campaign by nine different unions to recruit members at Blue Cross-Blue Shield, the largest provider of health insurance in the country. The experiment got off to an inauspicious start with a year’s delay while the AFL-CIO first set up bureaucratic oversight of the effort then mediated competing union jurisdictional claims for different sub-units of the targeted company. By the time recruiting actually began, Blue Cross- Blue Shield had implemented a union avoidance program and the response of workers was predictably cautious. There were a few isolated victories in small units, but the initiative ultimately failed and was abandoned (Northrup, 1990). Although the AFL-CIO’s attempt to broker a major organizing campaign was a disappointment, a small number of national unions took to heart the recommendations of The Changing Situation and implemented innovations in their own recruitment efforts. A theme issue of Labor Research Review (1986), aptly titled “Organize!”, highlighted campaigns by SEIU, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE), the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers (ACTWU, now part of UNITE, the Union of Needletrades and Industrial Textile Employees). These six national unions along with a few others subsequently have continued to lead the effort 7 to establish an organizing priority. Given the decentralized structure of the U.S. labor movement, it is no accident that the AFL-CIO backed away from direct involvement in organizing after the Blue Cross-Blue Shield debacle and assumed a more supportive role. Supportive does not mean irrelevant, however, and the organizing model concept itself originated in two distinct initiatives sponsored by the federation. Emergence of the Organizing Model The original specification of the organizing model can be traced to a massive teleconference on “internal organizing” sponsored on February 29 and March 1, 1988, by the AFL-CIO and broadcast by satellite to multiple locations across the country with hundreds of elected leaders and union staff participating. In the U.S. internal organizing is used to refer to activity within unionized workplaces, and though some recruiting of non-members may result, the focus is on mobilizing current members for union action. The labor educators and organizers planning the conference decided to contrast the typical union workplace with an activist one using the terms servicing model and organizing model. As defined in Numbers That Count (Diamond, 1988), a training manual developed based on the teleconference, the servicing model is “trying to help people by solving problems for them,” while the organizing model is “involving members in solutions.” The idea is that unions can be more effective representing workers if they use the same mobilizing techniques with current members that are most effective when recruiting new members. Throughout the late 1980’s the organizing model was used almost exclusively to apply to internal organizing. The concept was refined based on practice as summarized in 8 union oriented publications like the Labor Research Review. In an issue devoted to “Participating in Management,” most of the discussion stressed strengthening the union by pushing joint labor management decisions
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